Rather more than 20 years ago, a DEC/COMPAQ salesperson cold-called me to see if the ISP I was working at would like to switch to Alpha servers. After about 20 minutes, he offered a six-month free loan of a mid-range server -- probably $10-15K, I don't recall. It arrived a week later. We determined the hardware was pretty nice but the operating system was a major PITA -- this was when you expected to compile a large fraction of your software -- so it mostly sat on someone's desk for the last four months of the loan before the salesperson came to claim it.
But, yes: if you want to market hardware that nobody else can supply, you need to get it into the hands of people who will use it and evangelize for it.
[edit]We bought our new iSeries (Power9-based) through a VAR this year with an IBM rep helping us with what we actually needed. It was a bit of a drawn-out experience, but overall, I wasn't displeased. It was easier than dealing with some PC vendors (looking at you Dell and HP). I would imagine it will be another 15 years before we have to buy another one.[/edit]
When I worked at IBM, I usually called in a favor from friends at a local VAR whenever I needed to order something to get a BoM, because even internally the process was opaque.
The first one was the latest server that could run Series i. No big deal, we were coming to the end of our maintenance contract and would probably be buying a new machine in the next year or so.
The second one was a 2U, 48-socket POWER server. They bragged about it running thousands of Linux VM's at a time. I found it a bit odd because nobody who would be running this particular ERP software would be running thousands of Linux VM's.
From memory, about 8 IBM people showed up. They didn't seem to actually know each other, but were from several different groups within IBM.
We sat down, and started by explaining what we did with our existing x86-64 systems, and what we thought we'd like to try with the POWER system. We asked for a single box to evaluate, roughly the equivalent to our existing HP DL380 dual-Xeon boxes.
The folks from IBM then spent the next 40 minutes arguing with each other about exactly which system we should be using. Five minutes before the meeting was scheduled to end, one of them took charge and said they'd figure it out offline, and get back to use with the details.
Several more rounds of email were exchanged, but we never actually got to the point of being told what system we could have, or what its specs were, let alone actually being able to physically get one and test it.
It was perhaps the most absurd situation I've seen in 30 years in the industry.